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Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

reuters.com

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Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#51

Post by vkou »

foepys wrote: post #12
legulere wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) Wikipedia seems to give 4000 as an estimate on those exposed to the highest levels of radiation alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_proj... On the other hand coal, wind and solar never poisoned our food (wild boars in Germany thousands of km away still often are too…

Also if a terrorist flys a plane into a coal plant they will not make hundreds of km² uninhabitable.

If a terrorist flies a plane into a nuclear plant, the only thing that will be uninhabitable will be the plane.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#52

Post by mpweiher »

Tomte wrote: post #36
xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. So nuclear apologists are simply offering a calculation, where the biggest risk/liability has been left out, because "what number should we put in?". Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art. There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so thi…

> We still don't know how to handle spent fuel.

Actually we do, technically, and the amount is trivial (and can be reused, though that isn't currently being done). Spent fuel is a political problem. In fact, last time I checked even just the radiation from coal power plants is greater than from nuclear plants.

> The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art

Chernobyl was never state of the art and western reactors, which are much safer, are also of a design derived from military designs, not optimized for safety. Also, the negative health effects of coal and other energy sources are so much worse than even Chernobyl that it isn't funny.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#53

Post by kogepathic »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #26
kogepathic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If coal plants had the same radiation rules as nuclear plants, they couldn't run. I think you mean if nuclear plants had the same radiation output as coal plants, they would be required to shut down. Edit: thanks for the downvotes, I realise now that I'm basically stating the same thing as OP. Quite the double standard that coal plants are allowed to spew so much radiation when all other forms of power generation a…

What @wbl wrote also makes sense. Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored. There's no way we could hope to capture all the radioactive particles from a coal plant exhaust, not in the foreseeable future with any reasonable efficiency.

> Nuclear power has a closed fuel cycle: what goes in comes out and is stored.

Nowadays yes, but this wasn't always the case. The earliest Soviet reactors were open cycle and discharged directly into Lake Kyzyltash. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#55

Post by de_Selby »

Tomte wrote: post #36
xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

We still don't know how to handle spent fuel. So nuclear apologists are simply offering a calculation, where the biggest risk/liability has been left out, because "what number should we put in?". Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art. There are good reasons to think that it may indeed be so thi…

> We still don't know how to handle spent fuel.

Yes we do, we can reprocess most of it and then just store what's left - which is such a small amount it could just be buried and essentially forgotten about.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#56

Post by mpweiher »

whiskers08xmt wrote: post #32
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words nuclear never killed anybody apart from the ones it killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

I think the important difference is killing people when running as intended, versus killing people when disasters occur. In a way, a Nulcear power plant is similar to dam; when the dam breaks, it's a serious disaster, but as long as it runs as intended, humans aren't really at risk.

Yes, except that dam disasters have killed a lot more people than nuclear disasters.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#57

Post by mpweiher »

pdog wrote: post #7
xroche wrote: post #3

Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year ( ), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study) To be clear: nuclear is no…

Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.

Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you.

One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards).

Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima.

Odd. That.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#58

Post by ZeroGravitas »

An irony I've noticed recently is fans of nuclear saying: "Coal is killing people, if you say anything bad about Nuclear then you are killing people" and then turning round and attacking other, non-coal alternatives like wind, solar or even natural gas.

Initially I assumed these were actually coal supporters doing some devious concern trolling to delay the roll out of alternatives that are viable in the short term but I've come to accept that it's just another weird nerd-war like Emacs Vs Vi, except with deadlier real life consequences.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#59

Post by mpweiher »

bpodgursky wrote: post #19
pdog wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.

Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments…

And even with all of these obvious and avoidable mistakes, there were no fatalities.

In fact, it was Fukushima that turned me around on nuclear. I always thought that the risks were just too great, that if you weren't perfect there would be disasters of unimaginable proportions. And humans just aren't perfect.

I was wrong. Well, not on the last bit :-)

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#60

Post by hannob »

Maakuth wrote: post #37
legulere wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This graphic shows it pretty well in my opinion: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem... Purple is nuclear energy. Dark green is biomass, light blue is wind power, yellow is solar power

Pretty remarkable growth in PV! I do remember that Germany already had quite a bit of wind generators in the early 2000s, yet they seemed to have generated around the same amount of energy as the PV capacity of today. And that's been mostly build during this decade. What's missing from this graph, however, are imports. I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland.

> I believe Germany imports quite a bit of nuclear power from France and coal power from Poland.

No, that is totally wrong. While in an open net and marked there are always small exports and imports going on, overall Germany is an electricity exporter and imports are very small overall and not very relevant.

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